The present invention is related to hardware used to retain heatsinks, fans or other thermal control hardware in a position adjacent to an integrated circuit.
It has become commonplace for integrated circuits, particularly those used to comprise commonly available computer systems, to require the installation of specialized hardware for cooling, such as heatsinks, fans, thermoelectric cooler (TEC) modules, etc. As a result, numerous forms of hardware have been devised to maintain such specialized cooling hardware either in proximity to or in physical contact with such integrated circuits. The use of bus bars to provide enhanced carrying capacity of electrical power between portions of circuitboards is also known, including bus bars that additionally incorporate dielectric material between conductors to provide filtering of electrical power.
As a result of technological progress, integrated circuits continue to become physically smaller while the number of functions they perform continue to increase. This has resulted in an ever increasing density of electrical connections that must be made between such integrated circuits and the circuitboards to which they are attached in order to support this increasing number of functions. Circuitboards generally make electrical connections between integrated circuits and other components (including other integrated circuits) using traces routed on a plurality of layers. There are often also power and/or ground planes among these layers. To make electrical connections between circuitboards and integrated circuits in through-hole packages (such as DIP or PGA), or where a socket with through-hole pins is used, a plurality of holes are made through the circuitboard to accommodate the pins, and the traces are routed directly to the locations of those holes. In the case of integrated circuits in surface-mount packages (such as QFP or BGA), a plurality of holes are made through the circuitboard to accommodate the creation of vias through the circuitboard at locations adjacent to the surface mount contacts of the integrated circuits, and traces on layers other than the layer existing on the surface of the circuitboard to which the integrated circuit is attached are routed to those vias.
With the increasing density of electrical connections between integrated circuits and circuitboards, the density of these holes made through the circuitboard in the vicinity of where such integrated circuits are attached to a circuitboard is also increasing, and this increase in density of these holes can impede efforts to maintain the continuity of a ground or power plane passing through a region of a circuitboard where these holes exist. The effect can be the reduction of continuity through that region to such a degree that current carrying capacity between regions of a power or ground plane is compromised or undesirable voltage differentials can be allowed to develop in regions of the same power or ground plane on opposite sides of a region where such an integrated circuit has been mounted. A need exists to counteract this loss in continuity in a cost-effective manner.